Bass & Drums with The Callum Chenowyth Band

I spent today recording drums and bass with the Callum Chenowyth Band for an upcoming album. The band had recorded guide tracks in their home studio and brought stereo music mixes to import into Pro tools.

Tom, the drummer set up his Pearl Reference kit. It sounded great in the room right away so we started to set up microphones. The bass drum had an interesting configuration of ports - there were 3 small holes rather than one large one. Usually I like to get the mic inside the drum quite close to the beater but with the smaller hole it wasn't possible. I angled a Sennheiser 421 up inside pointing to where the beater makes contact with the batter head. It actually sounded great right off the bat running through the Neve 8024 channel strip. I boosted a little at 50Hz and cut a little at 300Hz et voila!

We ended up with SE RN17's as overheads in a spaced pair, SM57 snare top and Beyerdynamic M201 on snare bottom. AGK 414's went on the toms with the Audix D6 on the outside of the kick.

For the room microphones I've been using a mid-side stereo pair. Today we used the Peluso 2247 in figure 8 mode for the sides and a Shure KSM141 as the 'mid'. The advantage of this technique is that there are no phase issues between the mics and you can vary the width of the stereo image by blending more or less of the side mic into the mix.